How Sex Education Gets Funding
In This Section
Sex education funding is largely up to state and local governments — which includes whether or not sex education programs are funded at all, and if so how much money they get.
While there’s no federal funding dedicated to sex education, there is funding available that can support sex education. These programs include the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPPP). The Division of School and Adolescent Health (DASH) also funds school-based sex education.
The federal government also continues to provide funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) programs. Although the name has recently changed from AOUM to sexual risk avoidance (SRA), there is still $110M of federal funds allocated to these programs.
While programs like TPPP and PREP don’t cover the full scope of what sex education can be, they’re often the closest thing to sex education that many people will get. We need to fight to ensure that these sex education programs continue to receive proper federal funding and continue to challenge sexual risk avoidance programming at the federal, state, and local level.